Dozens of personnel from agencies across the emergency response spectrum gathered at the Samoa Airfield on Wednesday morning to kick off two days of training in an effort to provide better mutual aid coordination in the time of an actual emergency.

Personnel from local fire departments, state and federal parks, the state Office of Emergency Services, Cal Fire and the Coast Guard gathered at the airfield to practice over-land and over-water rescue techniques and to establish communications protocols to be used in the event of an emergency.

The planning for the exercise began three months ago and it gives the agencies involved a chance to work together in a training environment instead of trying to coordinate at the scene of an actual emergency.

The four members of one of two Coast Guard helicopter crews that staged for two days of training with other local agencies explain the equipment they use when out on a rescue mission on day one of the exercise, Wednesday. (Natalya Estrada — for the Times-Standard)

“My goal is to identify weaknesses and where we have some challenges in communications and the different ways we operate,” said Capt. Greg Fuller, commander Sector Humboldt Bay. “We want to identify any issues before we have a big event or crisis. This gives us the chance to evaluate everyone’s weaknesses and strengths. The Coast Guard’s strengths may be we’re the experts over water and we have some inland experience. But some of our partner agencies are the absolute experts when it comes to inland rescue, so we can all gain something from this experience.”

There were three helicopters parked at the airfield as the pre-exercise briefing was conducted by Cmdr. Brendan Hilleary, response department head at Sector Humboldt Bay, who outlined the training schedule for the next two days. Another Coast Guard helicopter arrived about an hour later as the gathered personnel split into two groups.

One group consisted of the various aircrews. They held a pre-flight briefing on the tarmac while the firefighters, park rangers and water rescue personnel gathered by the various emergency apparatus — trucks, trailers, and watercraft — to familiarize themselves with the equipment on display.

There were 12 agencies on hand. A key part of the exercise is not only to establish a rapport but to build trust between personnel in the air, on the ground or in the water.

“This training is important because we have such a variety of terrain here,” Hilleary said. “You have the coast, the mountains and we don’t have that many resources available so it’s important we build that trust so that no matter who shows up at an incident, we can work effectively together and get the job done.”

Water rescue personnel from state parks and local fire departments and the Coast Guard were present in addition to the aircrews. The rescue swimmers from the Coast Guard teamed up with the water rescue team at Humboldt Bay Fire for helicopter rescue evolutions over the bay along with rescue practice with boats.

For the members of Humboldt Bay Fire, knowledge of water rescue operations is a must with Eureka sitting on the bay.

“Our goal is to see how the different agencies operate with each other and get a better understanding of how different agencies and their helicopters operate,” said Capt. David Terry, coordinator of the department’s water rescue program. “We’ve got eight guys who will be in the water and we will work with the Coast Guard and their helicopter crews. Mutual aid is a big part of what we do and what we’re trying is to figure out how we can do that more fluently and efficiently.”

Terry said the goal is to learn the techniques used by the partner agencies — how they pull a victim from the water and transfer them to a basket and then onto a boat or onto a helicopter hoist. The task on Wednesday was to practice that real-time with the involved agencies.

“This is the first step to us doing more advanced operations in the future,” Terry said. “We’re most likely going to be the agency that makes first contact with a victim and we need to know how each agency performs from transferring a patient from our swimmers to their swimmers or to their helicopters and watercraft.”

“Cooperation,” “communication,” “coordination” and “planning for training” were the keywords Wednesday. In an area with rugged and inaccessible terrain, having personnel from various agencies trained to respond and support each other is vital.

“Some of the communications and how we talk to each other, which frequencies to use, it’s important we iron those out,” Fuller said. “We do things differently and different words and phrases mean different things to various agencies. It’s really important to work that out ahead of time. The other important piece of the training is when folks on the ground are talking to the helicopter crews. The helicopter has to trust the information they are getting and we have to establish that trust and this exercise builds that trust.”

The training exercise will finish with the Coast Guard coordinating with ground units to do a cliff rescue evolution at Patrick’s Point on Thursday afternoon.